“The father’s gift held a lesson…about patience and the understanding that little steps, compounded, do make a difference. That the things you do every single day, the things that don’t look that dramatic, that don’t even look like they matter, do matter. They not only make a difference — they make all the difference.”
– Jeff Olson and John David Mann, authors, in The Slight Edge; Turning Simple Disciplines Into Massive Success & Happiness
Look, it doesn’t matter if you’re a college football fan or not. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if you’re an Iowa Hawkeye fan or not.
The point is this. If it’s not a football team, it could be an accounting department. It could be a secretarial pool (or an executive admin pod, in today-speak). It could be a solo gig writing books or music or planting a crop. It could be cleaning teeth, raking lawns or doing surgery. The point is, we have a simple choice about how good we want to be.
The Slight Edge separates “superbitude” (seriously, that should be a word!) from averageness. The Slight Edge makes “ok” awesome, and it turns ho-hum into “Holy Cow!”
Iowa’s football team was picked to finish in the bottom third of The Big Ten Conference by all the “experts.” Even as they were 11-0, 12-0 and headed to the B1G Championship Game, pundits were decrying the team’s lack of “four and five-star athletes.” “How can this team even pretend to be a contender?” they would scream at their microphones.
All Coach Kirk Ferentz did was have his entire team and staff read The Slight Edge and apply the principles relentlessly until it just didn’t matter — because they were going to win.
It is not the best-written book I’ve ever read. Olson and Mann are not Hemingway and McCullough. What they are, though, are smart son-of-a-guns who tap a deep well of common sense to make a difference for a team, a state, a crazy-happy fan 1300 miles away, and anyone else that reads — and applies — The Slight Edge.
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